State of Solana Q3 2025

Key Insights

• Solana’s DeFi TVL increased 32.7% QoQ to $11.5 billion. Kamino grew 33.1% QoQ to maintain its lead in DeFi TVL (USD) at $2.8 billion.
• The Application Revenue Capture Ratio (Chain GDP divided by Real Economic Value) grew from 222.8% to 262.8%. An increasing App RCR signals that an ecosystem is increasingly monetizing activity occurring on the network.
• Stablecoin market cap on Solana grew 36.5% QoQ to an all-time high of $14.1 billion. USDC grew 39.6% QoQ to $10 billion while PYUSD grew 112.3% QoQ to $445.3 million.
• Forward Industries, led by Galaxy, Jump, and Multicoin Capital, raised $1.65 billion to raise the largest Solana DAT. Solana DATs hold 18.9 million SOL, worth $3.9 billion at the end of Q3.
• SOL finished Q3 2025 with a market cap of $113.5 billion, a 37% QoQ increase. The network also realized $222.3 million in real economic value (REV), which is defined as the sum of base transaction fees, priority fees, and MEV tips paid to validators.

Primer

Solana (SOL) is an integrated, open-source Layer-1 network with the goal of synchronizing global information at the speed of light. Solana optimizes for increasing bandwidth and reducing latency. It accomplishes this through features such as its novel timestamp mechanism called Proof-of-History (PoH), a block propagation protocol called Turbine, and parallel transaction processing. Since mainnet launch in March 2020, several network upgrades have brought further network performance and resilience, including QUIC, stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS), and local fee markets.

The network’s development and growth, and its ecosystem are supported by the non-profit Solana Foundation, for-profit Solana Labs, and various third-party organizations, including Anza, Colosseum, Helius, Superteam, and many others. Solana Labs has raised over $335 million in private and public token sales. Solana features a growing ecosystem of projects across many sectors, including DeFi, consumer, DePIN, and payments. To stay up-to-date with all things Solana, visit the Solana Portal.

Website / X / Discord

Key Metrics

Ecosystem Analysis

Application Revenue

Chain GDP is defined as the total application revenue generated on a network. In Q3 2025, Solana’s Chain GDP fell 3.7% QoQ from $606.7 million to $584.3 million. The leaders by application revenue in Q2’25 were as follows:

1. PumpFun: $118.4 million (25.1% QoQ decrease)
2. Jupiter: $92.9 million (21.4% QoQ increase)
3. Axiom: $84.6 million (33.1% QoQ decrease)
4. Phantom: $42.5 million (13% QoQ decrease)
5. Bonk.fun: $29.7 million (553.8% increase)

These applications facilitate the trading of assets, leading to revenue being directly correlated to speculation activity.

App Revenue Capture Ratio (App RCR)

A network’s App Revenue Capture Ratio (RCR) is the ratio of revenue generated by its apps to its Real Economic Value (REV). REV is defined as the sum of base transaction fees, priority fees, and MEV tips paid to validators. App RCR reflects the efficiency with which applications capitalize on the economic activity taking place on the network. The higher the app RCR, the more effectively apps capture the economic activity being generated on the network, suggesting a mature ecosystem with monetizable applications. A low App RCR may signal untapped potential for app developers or inefficiencies in revenue capture. Alternatively, it may signal a nascent ecosystem not yet ready for monetization.

If App RCR equals 20%, this implies that for every $1 of REV generated by the network, $0.20 is captured as revenue by apps. In Q3 2025, App RCR on Solana was 262.8%, up from 222.8% in Q2’25. This can be interpreted as when $100 is spent in transaction fees (and/or Jito tips) to interact with Solana, applications on Solana earn $262.84 in revenue.

A network’s App RCR can be greater than one when its applications are successful in monetizing activity, driving revenue streams for project teams and potentially, tokenholders. Examples include DEXs like Raydium charging trading fees on every swap. The trading fee depends on the given pool, 25bps for standard AMM pools, and a range of 1-100bps for CLMM and CPMM pools, all of which is used to buyback RAY tokens.

DeFi

DeFi TVL (USD) on Solana grew 32.7% QoQ to $11.5 billion. This performance allowed Solana to maintain its rank of second among networks in DeFi TVL after surpassing TRON in November 2024. The leading protocols on Solana, ranked according to DeFi TVL in Q3, were:

• Kamino: Maintaining its lead in TVL, ending with $2.8 billion and a market share of 24.1% as TVL grew 33.1% QoQ.
• Jupiter: Reclaimed the second spot as its TVL increased 59.6% QoQ, ending with $2.6 billion and a 22.1% market share. At Accelerate 2025 in May, the Jupiter team announced the Jupiter Lend product, powered by Fluid. The product launched in August 2025, and at the end of Q3’25, had $702.7 million in TVL.
  • Read more about Jupiter’s recent developments in our Jupiter: The DeFi Superapp report.
• Raydium: Fell to the third spot, though with its TVL increased 32.3% QoQ to $2.3 billion, a 20% market share. Read more about Raydium’s recent developments in our State of Raydium Q2 2025 report.

Spot DEXs

Average daily spot DEX volume (USD) grew 17% QoQ to $4 billion in Q3 2025. The leading protocols on Solana, ranked according to average daily spot DEX volume in Q3, were:

• Raydium: Average daily spot volume increased 17.1% QoQ to $821million with a 20.7% market share.
• Meteora: Claimed the second spot, as its average daily spot volume increased 49.2% QoQ to $745 million, a 18.8% market share. The majority of this rise can be attributed to the anticipation of the MET TGE set to commence on Oct. 23, 2025.
• Orca: Saw a 6.7% QoQ increase in average daily spot volume to $598.2 million, good for a market share of 15.1%.

In Q3’25, the Solana Ecosystem saw the rise of multiple Prop AMMs start to dominate SOL-stablecoin pairs. Prop AMMs are programmable liquidity pools that utilize offchain price oracles for real-time price discovery to offer tighter spreads and better prices for traders. Prop AMMs like HumidiFi and SolFi do not operate with front-ends and can only be traded on through DEX aggregators like Jupiter or Titan.

Launchpad Wars and PUMP Launch

In Q3’25, over 3 million tokens were created on Solana, falling 7.7%, but this is a 191.0% YoY increase.

Over the quarter, many teams launched competitors to PumpFun. While most failed to capture any meaningful market share for longer than a week, at the end of Q3 2025, Bonk’s launchpad quickly began gaining momentum and fully overtook PumpFun as the market leader during the second week of July. By August, however, PumpFun had reclaimed its market lead and continued through the end of the quarter.

These events coincided with the PUMP ICO that occurred on July 12, 2025. The team sold 150 billion tokens at a price of $0.004, representing an FDV of $4 billion and a raise of $600 million. The token began trading on July 14, 2025, and ended Q3 with a market cap of $2.3 billion.

In September 2025, PumpFun introduced Project Ascend, a rewards mechanism that implemented dynamic, tiered fees tied to market cap. Smaller-cap coins feature higher fee percentages, while larger-cap coins have lower ones. The change has significantly improved creator earnings. This led to 17,000 new streamers onboarding to the platform over the following weeks post Project Ascend’s launch. Read more about PumpFun’s streaming breakout in our Enterprise Note: Pump.fun goes Viral report.

Perp DEXs

Solana's average daily perp DEX volume (USD) grew 93% QoQ to $1.6 million. The leaders for the quarter are listed below:

• Jupiter: Averaged $725.7 million in daily perp trading volume, a 7.5% increase QoQ, ending the quarter with a 44.3% market share.
• Drift: Average daily perps volume grew 248.4% QoQ to $465.1 million, resulting in a 28.4% market share.
• Pacifica: Launched mainnet in June 2025 and started tracking volume on Sept. 9, 2025. Pacifica averaged $404.1 million in daily perp trading volume since then, ending the quarter with a 24.7% market share.
• Zeta: In March, Zeta’s core team launched their Network Extension, Bullet, on testnet. Bullet is a Layer-2 rollup on Solana that posts ZK proofs to Solana mainnet. The team has claimed that the platform’s latency will be limited to 2ms. The ZEX token will be 1:1 convertible to the BULLET token when mainnet launches in Q4 of this year.

Stablecoins

Stablecoin market cap (USD) on Solana grew 36.5% QoQ to $14.1 billion, ranking it third among all networks. Much of this growth this year came after the TRUMP token launched on Jan. 17, 2025, which brought an influx of liquidity to Solana and resulted in various high-liquidity pairs using USDC. The sustained increase in stablecoin market cap indicates much of the new capital remained on the network. Stablecoin market cap on Solana hit $15 billion shortly after the quarter ended on Oct. 4, 2025.

USDC ended the quarter with a market cap of $10 billion after growing 39.6% QoQ with a 71.1% market share. USDT was the second largest stablecoin on Solana by the end of Q3'25, with $2.4 billion (a 3.1% QoQ increase) and a 16.9% market share.

USDG grew to the third-largest stablecoin by market cap with $492.2 million after launching on Solana on Feb. 25, 2025. USDG is the stablecoin behind the Global Dollar Network (GDN). The yield earned on the stablecoin reserves is passed back to network partners instead of being kept by the issuers. The network consists of Galaxy, Kraken, OKX, Paxos, Robinhood, and many others.

With low transaction costs, sub-second finality, and a network of several thousand nodes, Solana aims to power mainstream payment flows. Notable events from Solana-native payments infrastructure companies and applications this quarter include:

• USD1, the stablecoin behind World Liberty Financial, went live on Solana on Sept. 14, 2025. USD1 ended Q3 with $175.5 million on Solana.
• On Sept. 29, 2025, the Phantom team announced CASH, their new stablecoin built using Open Issuance, Bridge’s new stablecoin platform. Phantom users will be able to link banks or cards to onramp funds into their wallet, convert to CASH without fees, use a Phantom debit card, and enable direct deposits.

RWA

Total real-world assets value (USD) on Solana ended Q3’25 at $682.2 million, a 41.9% QoQ increase. The leaders in the RWA category were as follows:

• Ondo Finance’s USDY, launched in August 2023, is a token backed by U.S. Treasuries and bank deposits, designed to function as a yield-bearing stablecoin with broad accessibility. As of Sept. 30, 2025, USDY was the largest yield-bearing RWA by market cap on Solana, with 6,909 holders and a market cap of $176.8 million.
• BUIDL is a tokenized U.S. money market fund developed by BlackRock, also in partnership with Securitize, holding cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries. As of Sept. 30, 2025, BUIDL was the second-largest yield-bearing RWA by market cap on Solana with four holders and a market cap of $175.2 million.
• ONyc is a multi-collateral, yield-bearing asset that has a target base APY of 16%. OnRe, the team behind ONyc, is the world’s first fully licensed onchain reinsurance company. ONyc bridges the gap between onchain capital and the reinsurance markets. As of Sept. 30, 2025, ONyc was the third-largest yield-bearing RWA by market cap on Solana with 1,807 holders and a market cap of $102.8 million.

Other RWA Related Events

• xStocks is a suite of tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs offered by Backed, a regulated Swiss issuer, in partnership with Kraken. Announced in May 2025 and launched on June 30, 2025, with over 60 products ranging from Apple and Tesla to broad index funds. At the end of Q3’25, there were over 70,420 holders of xStocks, with a total market cap of $115.7 million. Tesla’s xStock, TSLAx, was the largest by value with 14,418 holders and a market cap of $20 million.
• On Sept. 3, 2025, Galaxy Digital announced that it will launch its tokenized GLXY Shares on Solana in partnership with Superstate. At the end of Q3’25, there were 4,018 holders and a market cap of $1.1 million.

Read more about Solana’s RWAs developments in Messari’s State of Solana: Real-world Assets report.

Liquid Staking

The liquid staking rate on Solana decreased from 12.2% to 11.6%. With 67.1% of SOL’s circulating supply staked, a growing liquid staking rate enables a DeFi ecosystem built on yield-bearing SOL.

• Jito’s jitoSOL remained the liquid staking token (LST) leader on Solana. The token’s liquid staking market share fell from 38% to 31.7%, for a total market cap of $3.1 billion.
• Binance’s bnSOL saw its market share grow from 18.9% to 26.2%, for a total market cap of $2.6 billion.
• Jupiter’s jupSOL saw its market share grow from 10.7% to 10.8%, for a total market cap of $1.1 billion.
• Marinade’s mSOL saw its market share fall 9.9% QoQ from 10.4% to 9.4%, for a total market cap of $933.7 million. Read more about Marinade’s recent developments in our State of Marinade Q2 2025 report.

Consumer

NFTs

Average daily NFT trading volume (USD) on Solana grew 2.2% QoQ to $996,700 in Q3 2025. In Q3’25, trading card game (TCG) platforms Phygitals, Collector Crypt, and Emporium did a collective $226.7 million in volume. Phygitals, a marketplace for digitized trading cards, crossed $30 million in cumulative all-time volume in September 2025, after launching in April 2025.

Gaming

• In July 2025, Off the Grid, the battle royale game, announced that the GUN token would be issued natively on Solana.
• In July 2025, Cross the Ages, a trading card game with an RPG game built in the same universe, set to release in the future, migrated to Solana.
• In August 2025, the Star Atlas team announced that they are building z.ink, an identity-linked SVM Layer-1.
• In August 2025, the Play Solana team announced that they had partnered with Jupiter Mobile to make Jup Mobile the exclusive wallet for their PSG1 device, which began shipping in early October 2025. The Play Solana team also held a presale for its upcoming PLAY token via Metaplex’s Genesis on Oct. 13, 2025, raising ~$2.6 million within 5 minutes.
• In September 2025, PORTALS, the token behind the Portals platform, went live. Portals is seen as the “Roblox of Web3 " and ended Q3 at $11.5 million.
• On Sept. 30, 2025, Addicted, a weed farm simulator, launched on Solana, bringing in over $3.5 million in revenue in 48 hours, flipping PumpFun’s revenue for a 24-hour period.
• Parallel Colony launched in early access on the Solana Seeker phone, giving Seeker users an exclusive sneak peek into the Colony game at a very early build. Part of the unique gameplay is using natural language, rather than direct controls, to guide avatars to complete game tasks.
• Shortly after Q3 ended, on Oct. 1, 2025, Dupe announced its beta, which allows users to buy and sell CS2 skins, a popular first-person web2 game.

Other Consumer-related News

• Announced in May 2025 at Accelerate, the Solana Mobile Seeker phone began shipping in the first week of August 2025. The phone features an improved camera, longer battery, and internal hardware wallet built in collaboration with Solflare. The phone has a 108+32 MP camera, 6.36” display, 128 GB of storage, and 8 GdB of memory. The phone also has a fingerprint scanner for extra security and 3 free months of Helium Mobile coverage.
• In July 2025, 9GAG and Moonit partnered to launch their Meme Money Market, which instantly converts viral memes into tradable coins.
• In August 2025, Nina, an onchain music platform for artists and labels, onboarded Numero Group. Numero group brings over releases from Yung Lean, Purelink, aya, Significant Other, Dan English, and more.
• Starting on Sept. 8, 2025, Seeker Season began to feature Apps, rewards, and exclusive mobile experiences. Users are incentivized to participate and track their activity, with some users speculating on a SKR token airdrop. The SKR token will power the economy, incentives, and ownership across the Solana Mobile ecosystem.
• In September 2025, Kalshi introduced a Builders Program in partnership with the Solana Foundation and Base, providing funding, technical expertise, and marketing support to advance the prediction markets ecosystem. This follows Kalshi’s decision to enable native deposit support for SOL and USDC in Q2 2025. Jupiter also announced their prediction market product, powered by Kalshi’s liquidity, in October 2025.
• In September 2025, ApeCoin, the coin behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem, announced they are expanding APE to Solana, its first non-EVM chain.
• In October 2025, Neuko unveiled its IP on Solana. Nueko is built by the core Doodles team.
• In October 2025, Audius, a community-run music platform, unveiled artist coins.
• In October 2025, Moonbirds, a popular Ethereum NFT collection, announced that it will launch its BIRB token on Solana. Later in October 2025, Moonbirds also announced Soul Bound Tokens for Solana Seeker and Saga users. On September 12, 2025, Moonbirds had the highest grossing RWA primary sale on CollectorCrypt.

DePIN

Solana continues to be a hub for DePIN applications, hosting Helium, Hivemapper, GEODNET, Render, Nosana, Jambo, NATIX, and more. Notable Q3’25 events include:

• Helium Mobile: By the end of Q3’25, Helium had 1.3 million daily users and 459,700 Helium Mobile subscribers. Read more about Helium’s recent developments in Messari’s State of Helium Q2 2025 report.
• XNET: By the end of Q3’25, XNET had offloaded over 310 terabytes of data from over 22 million users.
• Hivemapper: By the end of Q3’25, Hivemapper had mapped about 13.6 million unique miles, 36% of global coverage, or the surface area of the streets within an urban area. In June 2025, NBC Universal became a customer of Bee Maps, which is powered by Hivemapper. In July 2025, Volkswagen announced that it will be using Bee Maps to power its autonomous vehicle testing operations.
• Geodnet: At the end of Q3’25, Geodnet surpassed 19,900 active Satelite Miners worldwide, reinforcing its position as the world’s largest RTK network. Read more about Geodnet’s recent developments in Messari’s State of Geodnet Q2 2025 report.

DeSci

In Q3, Solana DeSci teams doubled down on crypto-native onchain growth, while also breaking new ground in traditional biotech and academia. Updates include:

• In July 2025, Curetopia, the first bioDAO to launch on Solana focusing on addressing rare diseases, announced that it had consolidated about 40 rare inherited metabolic diseases into a streamlined strategy, successfully completed a pilot for AARS2, and expanded to five additional ARS gene pairs, identifying promising patterns and overlapping rescuers for GARS1 and AARS1.
• In July 2025, SpineDAO published a peer-reviewed study on PubMED highlighting the need for expert-labeled data in AI models for spinal care. In just days, clinicians labeled 1,875+ patient records with experts earning SPINE based on their contributions.
• In September 2025, Bio Protocol announced it raised $6.9 million in a strategic funding round led by Maelstrom Fund to advance its launchpad and AI-driven software.
• In September 2025, Pump Science allowed users to create projects permissionlessly. Pump Science allows users to submit compounds for testing experiments to gain funding to test these interventions through trading fees on the platform.
• In September 2025, Genpulse, the team behind using AI to transform health data into personalized diagnostics and tokenized scientific collaboration, was accepted into Cohort 3 of the Solana Incubator.

Infrastructure

Notable infrastructure-related events from Q3’25 include:

• In July 2025, SharkLabs announced that 20 universities are running validators with over $600 million in stake.
• In July 2025, Metamask announced that users could stake SOL directly through the wallet.
• In July 2025, the Jito team announced its Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM). Jito BAM brings verifiability, privacy, and programmability to Solana's transaction pipeline. Developers will be able to develop plugins which all have unique capabilities to the pipeline. Some examples of use cases included just-in-time oracle updates, cancels and maker priority, and feeless transactions.
• In July 2025, Metaplex announced Genesis, a new protocol for Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) on Solana. The first team to use the new protocol was Collector Crypt, an onchain trading card peer-to-peer marketplace platform.
• In September 2025, MagicBlock announced that its TEE-secured Ephemeral Rollups are live on Solana mainnet. This allows developers to build private and compliant applications with real-time execution.
• At the end of Q3’25, about 25% of Solana mainnet stake was running on DoubleZero’s testnet. On Oct. 2, 2025, DoubleZero’s mainnet went live, along with its 2Z token.

Growth

In Q3 2025, 23 projects announced funding rounds, a 64.3% QoQ increase. These projects raised a combined $211.9 million, a 70.2% QoQ decrease. Some of the notable funding rounds include:

• Titan: A meta-DEX aggregator for spot token swaps that raised a $7 million Seed round with investments led by Galaxy Ventures and participation from Frictionless and Mirana Ventures.
• Bulk: A perp DEX that raised an $8 million Seed round with investments led by Robot Ventures and 6th Man Ventures.
• Raiku: A high-performance block building engine that raised a $13.5 million Seed round led by Pantera and participation from Jump and Lightspeed.

Events

Events occurring in Q4:

• Solana on Wall Street: Solana Spaces at 35 Wall Street through early November
• Accelerate APAC Shanghai: Oct. 24-26, 2025
• Accelerate APAC Hangzhou: Oct. 26, 2025
• Accelerate APAC Shenzhen: Oct. 28, 2025
• Solana Breakpoint: Solana’s flagship conference in Abu Dhabi from Dec. 11-13, 2025.

The full list of community events can be found here.

Network Analysis

Usage

Network activity, measured by non-vote transactions and fee payers, saw metrics decrease in Q3 2025. Average daily fee payers decreased 29.1% QoQ to 2.8 million, and average daily non-vote transactions decreased 3.3% to 95.9 million.

The average transaction fee decreased by 19.7% QoQ to 0.000061 SOL ($0.012), and the median transaction fee decreased by 10.5% QoQ to 0.000006 SOL ($0.0012). There was a spike in average transaction fees in January when the TRUMP token launched before President Trump took office. On January 19, the average fee paid was $0.41; however, the median fee paid was $0.003, highlighting the power of local fee markets. Helius was able to consistently land 100% of transactions during this period with fees as low as $0.001.

Security and Decentralization

Total stake (USD) reclaimed an all-time high of $102 billion on Sept. 18, 2025, when SOL hit approximately $248. Staked SOL (USD) increased 42.4% QoQ to $85.5 billion in Q3’25, up from $60 billion at the end of Q2’25. Total stake (SOL) grew 4.7% QoQ, from 391.3 million to 409.6 million.

The Nakamoto coefficient is the minimum number of nodes needed to break liveness. The metric can also be measured across other dimensions important to the resilience of a validator network, including distribution of stake by location, hosting provider, and clients.

Solana’s Nakamoto coefficient ended Q3’25 at 20, which is above the median of other networks. Solana’s 963 active validators (down 9% QoQ) are hosted in 38 countries. Solana validators are hosted in 208 unique data centers, down 10% QoQ, and its hosting data center Nakamoto coefficient fell to 6.

Performance, Upgrades, and Roadmap

Agave Updates

At the time of writing, about 80% of validators are running a V2.3 or later version, with about 4% of validators running the most recent release of V3.0. Technically, most of the network stake is running the Jito-Solana client, an Agave fork optimized for MEV.

At the Accelerate event in May 2025, the Anza team announced Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol. Alpenglow is aimed squarely at transforming transaction finality by collapsing core legacy systems, including Proof of History, Tower BFT, and gossip‑based vote propagation, into two streamlined mechanisms: Rotor for data propagation and Votor for offchain voting. By standardizing a fixed 400ms block time and eliminating per‑slot vote transactions in favor of lightweight BLS‑aggregated certificates anchored onchain, Alpenglow is projected to reduce finality latency dramatically from roughly 12.8 seconds to 100–150ms, representing a 100× improvement in responsiveness. Simultaneously, the elimination of vote fees and streamlined client logic lowers operational costs, making smaller validators more viable and simplifying ledger growth by shrinking unnecessary onchain data.

Under its new fault‑tolerance model, Alpenglow provides “20 + 20” resilience. Safety is preserved if up to 20 % of stake is adversarial, and liveness is maintained even if an additional, separate 20 % of stake goes offline, offering robust protection in varied network conditions. Because both Rotor and Votor are designed to operate without leader coupling, the protocol naturally supports innovations like multiple concurrent proposers, opening doors to reduced MEV and parallel block proposals. While some protocol details, such as slashing mechanics and relay compensation, remain unresolved, the proposal is scheduled for community review, testnets, and possible mainnet rollout at Breakpoint in December 2025, pending governance and SIMD approval.

Firedancer/Frankendancer Updates

Beyond improvements to the Agave client, the network is set to benefit from upcoming clients being created from scratch. Notably, Jump Crypto is developing Firedancer in C.

Frankendancer, a version of Firedancer that includes parts of Agave code, has been live on Solana's mainnet since September 2024. Additionally, Firedancer is fully live on testnet and live on mainnet in a non-voting mode. This means the client can listen to the network and replay blocks in real time. In October 2025, 173 validators, about 17% of the stake, ran Frankendancer or Frankendancer-Jito.

Financial Analysis

SOL’s circulating market cap (USD) grew 37% QoQ to $113.5 billion. At the end of Q3 2025, SOL remained at 6th among all cryptocurrencies by circulating market cap, behind BTC, ETH, USDT, XRP, and BNB.

Real Economic Value (REV), which is the sum of vote transaction fees, base transaction fees, priority transaction fees, and MEV tips paid to validators, decreased 52.36% QoQ in SOL terms to 1.2 million ($222.3 million). Of this, 43.1% came from MEV tips, with the rest coming from transaction fees.

SOL ETF

The SEC allowed Rex Osprey to launch their Solana Staking ETF, with the ticker SSK, on June 27, 2025, with trading beginning on July 2, 2025. The fund invests “a small amount” of the ETF's assets into JitoSOL. This is the first staking crypto ETF to be approved in the U.S. Since inception, the ETF has had $330.2 million of flows into the product. To view up-to-date flows, view Farside’s ETF dashboard.

Nine other issuers have also filed for a Solana Spot ETF and are still waiting for approval, with the most recent filings coming from Invesco and Galaxy. Most of these applications have an approval decision expected to be announced by October 2025.

Digital Asset Treasury Companies (DATs)

On Sept. 12, 2024, the Canadian-traded company Cypherpunk Holdings rebranded to SOL Strategies, representing its bet on the Solana ecosystem. Since then 19 other companies have followed their lead and accumulated SOL onto their treasury balance sheet. The most notable SOL DAT to launch in Q3’25 was Forward Industries. In September 2025, Forward announced a $1.65 billion private placement led by Galaxy Digital, Jump Crypto, and Multicoin Capital. Multicoin GP Kyle Samani became the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the company.
Forward is the largest Solana DAT with 6.8 million SOL, while the Solana Company, backed by Pantera and Summer Capital, is the second largest with 2.2 million. At the end of Q3’25, all Solana DATs held 18.9 million SOL ($3.9 billion).

Closing Summary

Solana’s ecosystem strengthened across major verticals in Q3 2025, led by a 32.7% rise in DeFi TVL to $11.5 billion and a record $14.1 billion in stablecoins. Kamino and Jupiter continued to anchor DeFi activity, while RWAs grew 41.9% to $682.2 million on the back of Ondo’s USDY and BlackRock’s BUIDL. Network liquidity deepened through new products like Jupiter Lend and tokenized Galaxy Digital shares, signaling Solana’s growing role in institutional-grade finance.

Network fundamentals remained strong despite lower activity metrics. Average daily fee payers fell 29.1% to 2.8 million, but non-vote transactions dipped just 3.3% to 95.9 million. SOL’s market cap reached $113.5 billion, and staked SOL climbed 4.7% to 409.6 million, as total stake value surged 42.4% to $85.5 billion. The launch of the first U.S.-approved Solana staking ETF underscored deepening market legitimacy.

Ecosystem sentiment was notably positive as the launch of the Solana Mobile Seeker phone, new gaming integrations, and a vibrant summer of consumer apps reinforced Solana’s position as a hub for onchain experimentation. Projects like Helium, Hivemapper, and Jito showcased the diversity of Solana’s DePIN and infrastructure base. Looking ahead, Breakpoint, the premier Solana conference, will bring builders and enthusiasts together to discuss the network’s next phase of growth in December 2025. To stay up-to-date with all things Solana, visit Messari's Solana Portal.

Let us know what you loved about the report, what may be missing, or share any other feedback by filling out this short form. All responses are subject to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

This report was commissioned by the Solana Foundation. All content was produced independently by the author(s) and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. or the organization that requested the report. The commissioning organization may have input on the content of the report, but Messari maintains editorial control over the final report to retain data accuracy and objectivity. Author(s) may hold cryptocurrencies named in this report. This report is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results. Please see our Terms of Service for more information.

No part of this report may be (a) copied, photocopied, duplicated in any form by any means or (b) redistributed without the prior written consent of Messari®.